“She’ll be fine,” Clint said. “Come on. Go to sleep, Jeanette. Let yourself rest.”
Without looking at him, Jeanette said a single word. “No.”
9
To Clint, the warden’s office had an archaeological appearance, as if it had been abandoned for years instead of less than a week. Janice Coates lay on the couch, wrapped in her cerements of white. Michaela went to her and knelt down. She stroked the cocoon with one hand. It gave off crackling sounds. Garth started to approach her, but Clint took his arm. “Give her a minute, Dr. Flickinger.”
It was actually more like three before Michaela got to her feet. “What can we do?” she asked.
“Can you be persistent and persuasive?” Clint asked.
She fixed him with eyes that were no longer bloodshot. “I came to NewsAmerica as an unpaid intern at twenty-three. By twenty-six, I was a full-time correspondent and they were talking about giving me my own evening show.” She saw Billy giving a look to Tig and Rand, and smiled at them. “You know what they say around here, don’t you? It ain’t bragging if it’s the truth.” She returned her attention to Clint. “Those are my references. Are they good enough?”
“I hope so,” Clint said. “Listen.”
He talked for the next five minutes. There were questions, but not many. They were in a bad corner, and all of them knew it.
CHAPTER 6
1
Alexander Peter Bayer, the first baby to be born on the other side of the Tree, son of a former Dooling inmate named Linda Bayer, breathed air for the first time a week after Lila and Tiffany returned from the wreck below Lion Head. It was another few days before Lila made his acquaintance at a small gathering in Elaine Nutting Geary’s repaired home. He was not a traditionally attractive infant; the stacking of his many jowls produced an association not with the Gerber Baby but with a bookie that Lila had once arrested who had been known as “Larry Large.” However, baby Alexander had an irresistibly comic way of rolling his eyes around, as if he were anxiously attempting to gain his bearings amid the flowering of female faces that loomed above him.
A plate of slightly crispy (though still pretty tasty) scones was passed around. Between bouts of the strange vertigo that afflicted her, Nadine Coombs had baked them in an outdoor oven. The oven itself had recently been hauled from the ruins of the Lowe’s in Maylock, using sledges and Tiffany’s horses. It flabbergasted Lila sometimes, the rate of progress they were making, the speed and efficiency with which problems were solved and advancements made.
At some point Lila ended up with the baby. “Are you the last man on earth, or the first?” she asked him.
Alexander Peter Bayer yawned.
“Sorry, Lila. He doesn’t talk to cops.” Tiffany had sidled up beside her in the corner of the living room.
“That so?”
“We teach em young around here,” Tiffany said.
Since their adventure they’d become odd friends. Lila liked how Tiffany rode around town on her horses, wearing her white cowboy hat, insisting that children come over and stroke the animals’ necks, and see how soft and warm they were.
2
One day, with nothing better to do, Lila and Tiffany searched the Dooling YMCA, not knowing exactly what they were looking for, only knowing it was one of the few places that hadn’t been investigated. They found plenty of stuff, some of it interesting, but nothing they really needed. There was toilet paper, but supplies of that in the Shopwell were still plentiful. There were also cartons of liquid soap, but over the years it had hardened into pink bricks. The pool had dried up; nothing remained but a faint, astringent odor of chlorine.
The men’s locker room was damp and dank; luxuriant growths of mold—green, black, yellow—spanned the walls. A varmint’s mummified corpse lay at the far end of the room, its legs stiff in the air, its face frozen in a savage death-gape, lips stretched away from rows of sharp teeth. Lila and Tiffany stood for a moment in silent contemplation of the first urinal in a row of six.
“Perfectly preserved,” said Lila.
Tiffany gave her a quizzical look. “That?” Pointing at the varmint.
“No. This.” Lila patted the top of the urinal, her wedding ring clicking against the porcelain. “We’ll want it for our museum. We can call it the Museum of Lost Men.”
“Ha,” Tiffany said. “Tell you what, this is a scary fuckin place. And believe me, that is sayin something because I have toured some real dungeons. I mean, I could write you a guidebook of the sweaty, drafty, fucked-up meth caves of Appalachia, but this is truly unpleasant. I knew men’s locker rooms were creepy places, but this is worse than I could ever have imagined.”
“It was probably better before it got old,” Lila said . . . but she wondered.
They used hammers and chisels to break the combination locks off the lockers. Lila found stopped watches, wallets full of useless green paper and useless plastic rectangles, dead smart phones thus rendered stupid, key rings, moth-eaten trousers, and a caved-in basketball. Tiffany’s haul wasn’t much better: an almost full box of Tic Tacs and a faded photograph of a bald man with a hairy chest standing on a beach with his little laughing daughter perched on his shoulders.
“Florida, I bet,” Tiffany said. “That’s where they go if they got the scratch.”
“Probably.” The photo made Lila think of her own son, which she increasingly felt was counterproductive—not that she could keep from doing it. Mary had filled her in on Clint, stalling to keep the officers at the prison, and Jared, hiding their bodies (our other bodies, she thought) in the attic of the show house up the street. Would she hear any more about either of them? A couple of other women had appeared since Mary, but none of them knew anything about her two guys, and why would they? Jared and Clint were on a spaceship and the spaceship was getting farther and farther away, so many light years, and eventually they’d slip from the galaxy entirely and that would be the end. Finito. When should she begin to mourn them? Had she already started?
“Aw,” said Tiffany. “Don’t.”
“What?”
But Tiffany had read her face somehow, seen right through to the hopelessness and the muddle. “Don’t let it get you.” Lila returned the photo to its locker and shut the door.
In the gymnasium upstairs, Tiffany challenged her to a game of H-O-R-S-E. The prize was the almost full box of Tic Tacs. They pumped up the basketball. Neither of them had any talent for the game. Clint’s daughter who had turned out to not be his daughter would have dispatched them both with ease. Tiffany shot everything granny-style, underhanded, which Lila found annoyingly girly but also cute. When she had her coat off, you could see her pregnant stomach protrude, a bulb at Tiffany’s waist.
“Why Dooling? Why us? Those are the questions, wouldn’t you say?” Lila trotted after the basketball. Tiffany had shot it into the dusty bleachers to the right of the court. “I’ve got a theory.”